Category Archives: DDW4

Normally in my DDW experiments I do 5 seeds per sample. I realized during RC4 that this may not be enough. The reasoning is that there was a seed that potentially grew mold in the sample and it looked very similar to the experiments from the DDW series that grow root hairs.

I believe that the root hairs are a real phenomenon, because during RC1, the DDW sample had 30 seeds and they all had root hairs well after I stopped recording data, as suggested by the results of the DDW sample in the first DDW experiment. But now I’m hoping to prove this conclusively or at least consistently.

Here is my plan:

10 samples of DDW water in cuvettes.

Each sample has 5 seeds.

2 controls, 1 tap water, and 1 DI water. I’m amenable to increasing the number of either of these samples or both, but think it is most important to increase the number of DDW samples.

Originally I was planning on doing just tobacco seeds, but I will also do this for arabidopsis seeds. I have no (good) data for the arabidopsis seeds, and having a large sample set will convince me that something either is/isn’t happening with arabidopsis.

I will also be doing 2 different breeds (?) of tobacco seeds: Cuban Havanna and Virginia Gold #1. The VG seeds will be a newer batch of seeds than in previous trials. I wanted to use the rest of these seeds, but had really poor results with the last experiment so I’m scrapping them in favor of the newer order.

I would really love to aliquot my seeds for future experiments, but don’t know a good way to do this. I have wax paper envelopes but don’t think they are viable for dealing with small numbers of seeds. I also have tons of PCR tubes, but the plastic may become charged and make it impossible to get the seeds out of the tubes. I’d really love some ideas for this.

I’m going to setup this experiment at some point tomorrow, and realize that I haven’t provided much time for the preplanning to propagate the scientific community, but hope that it generates some help in the time.

Also this would be a good time to pose the question: would it be possible to mark a notebook entry in such a way that visitors could be alerted that there is a community question? Basically I would like to be able to flag a post so that people could direct their attention to a pressing issue in the notebook and be able to provide help immediately rather than waiting for someone to stumble upon the post randomly. Hmmmm…